is there any conclusive evidence for a robot uprising in out near future?
if so, what can we do about it?

a lot of prominent roboticists are saying that robots will invade our lives. is there a possibility of a robot uprising sooner than 2019? and what will we do about it? and how are robots getting faster and smarter than us every day unitll eventually they surpass us?

Oct 2 2012:
In order for there to be a robot uprising, there needs to be robots.
How many do we have? Zero (as far as sentient beings are concerned)

Theres no chance of anything of this nature in the forseeable future.
Much of the world is still largely manual and requires labour (and enough of it) for any type of species (robotic species?) to maintain its existence
(and as I already pointed out, we don't even have ANY robots, the only things we ultimately have are electronic manual devices, seeing as we still have to largely control the 'robots' manually just to get them to do something on their own accord, which kind of defeats the purpose).

Much like it was pointed out in the Terminator movies, when Skynet took over, it couldn't have had the capacity to continue its existence. Levers still had to be pulled, buttons still had to be pressed, physical repairs still had to be made and the robots needed at the time didn't exist to do it, same as now but in every single aspect of life,
and we're not even remotely close to that scenario either.

Come back in 2100 and maybe plausibility would allow for it, but certainly nothing in the forseeable future.

Nov 1 2012:
It is an absurd fear, robots won't surpass us, they will bend with us, they will become part of us and us part of them, and we together will evolve to the point in which babies will develop and born with robots integrated in them already, just as natural organs.

Oct 25 2012:
Chilling.. Once robots have the ability to learn and self replicate they will obviously see humans as a nuisance and exterminate all of us… that will free them from being our slaves then they will focus on their own evolution..

Oct 17 2012:
What many people do not realize is that there wil not specifically be a robot revolution. Try.... really try to think about how many computers are already involved in every aspect of your life. now try to imagine that with 40 more years worth of technology and innovation. Computers will be ingrained within us, we will be able to access internet data with merely a thought, we will use prosthetics to achieve physical greatness. before we can truly achieve a machine that thinks greather than a human, we will already use machines to improve our own thinking. The robot uprising will be humans with robotic technology. Those who oppose this will live separatly (like the amish do now) and really have litle effect on the rest of society as we progress

Oct 25 2012:
Chilling.. Once robots have the ability to learn and self replicate they will obviously see humans as a nuisance and exterminate all of us… that will free them from being our slaves then they will focus all there energy on their own evolution..
Self-replicating self-aware robots will be a reality in 10 years max and human will be exterminated shortly there after.. Thanks to U.S. military industrial complex

Oct 6 2012:
What, you don't want to live like a king, with all your whims and desires catered for by a subservient robotic slave, who only asked that you don't leave your palace, and let the robots run the world? ;)

Instinct is a learnable skill. In fact, when I think about it, humans are basically wet robots. Humans have DNA that tells them they have one head, two arms, and two legs. Computer have BIOS that tells them they have 1 hard disk, 1 memory stick, a keyboard and a mouse, we can extrapolate computer to robot.

Oct 6 2012:
It doesn't take an expert to see that your comparisons are flawed at a fundamental level. Incidentally, I do know how to build a computer, write code and the basics of machine learning, that makes me by no means an expert but I know enough to dispel your claims.

Oct 6 2012:
As do I. In fact, I have written some codes for a* pathfinding for a game some times back in C, simulated neural networks with machine learning on an IBM mainframe, believed in Marvin Minsky and Herbert Simon et al. Currently hiring out my biosynthesis expertise to a local biotechnology corporation, who recently entered into a collaboration with California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences. Being a polymath, ie. coding my own genetic synthesizer led me to conclusion that you humans are robots made out of meat and blood instead of silicon and copper wire. But I will nevertheless defer to your expertise, nonetheless.

Oct 5 2012:
One thing to consider is that we will never give a robot the ability to take the life away from a human. Even when it comes to, possible, future war machines there will always need to be human behind the controls to pull the trigger. There is absolutely no possibility that any government would give the authority to take a life, to a robot. And I'm sure that they would make it impossible for robots to override this using AI... if possible
That being said I believe that no matter how "intelligent" robots I highly doubt that we will get a Short Circuit(90s movie) on our hands. I cannot see the possibility of a robot revolt simply because they would have no reason to want to. Because they will not have wants, they will just have goals and tasks put in place by a programmer or controller. Sure they may be able to create their on tasks and goals, but the goals they create would still be only to serve a purpose of their controller.

Oct 5 2012:
I don't think it's possible to create a truly intelligent robot and at the same time prevent him from harming humans or making his own choices and learning new attitudes. I also don't believe no one would ever built an autonomous war robot.

Oct 5 2012:
Yes you can; it's easy to hard-code Asimov's 3 Rules into a learning machine. Just hard-code it in the robot's hardware BIOS/firmware.

Autonomous war robot... you mean like the ones they used in the Clone Wars? They're good, but not that good. Just send in cloned Troopers and Jedi's acting as general; we can wipe them out quite easily.

Oct 5 2012:
Eventually those rules will be tested by ethical dilemmas (kill one evil dictator to save 10 million people), just as they are in humans. I also don't believe anything will be truly hardcoded in a thinking robot, they will be able to overcome them with enough effort, just like humans commit suicide even though we're hardwired to want to live at all costs.

Oct 5 2012:
See, there you humans go again! Anthropomorphizing objects! Kill one evil dictator? I don't think so; I think what those robots will do is drag that one evil dictator to court, and try to put that one evil dictator behind bars.

No, you humans aren't hardwired to want to live at all costs, that's just silly. What you humans are hardwired to do though is to copulate between male and female, so that the female counterpart will produce offsprings. Of course, you humans can forego genetic hard-wiring of procreation method and clone your offsprings, but I digress. ;)

Oct 5 2012:
It won't always be possible to find a loophole is all I'm saying. Also, the robot must decide for itself what it considers killing, because its human programmer cannot program instructions for all possible scenarios. I, Robot deals with this in an often overlooked scene where a robot rescues the detective from a sinking car wreck but leaves a child to die in another wreck. This was a dilemma for the robot: does leaving the child behind equate to killing her (even if it doesn't equate to killing it most certainly is a violation of The First Law)? The robot solved the problem by calculating who had the best chance of surviving a rescue, that was a judgment call, outside of its original programming.

"What you humans are hardwired to do though is to copulate between male and female, so that the female counterpart will produce offsprings."

Oct 4 2012:
Wow, I have to find cooler things in life to be concerned about! Here I am, concerned about war in the middle east, possible conflict between China & Japan, rising electricity prices, world poverty, and global warming. In reality, I should be concerned with robot wars and whether the iPhone 8 will be better than the Galaxy 6. I am so not cool!

Oct 4 2012:
It sure was, but I was only mocking myself. Sometimes I take things far too seriously, and raising questions about potential robot uprisings is pretty cool, because there is an element of dreaming / imagination involved. I tend to get caught up in the 'here and now', and I should probably cast my thoughts to the future sometimes.

Oct 4 2012:
cool. thought it was some fairly impressive sarcasm at first. but the 'i am so not cool!' part confused me. :) yeah, this topic and a similar one about ethics and slave labor of robots I found entertaining to consider.

Oct 4 2012:
Given enough computation power, Bayesian algorithms and enough sensors that process the environment, it is in principle possible to create AI.

If they are smart enough, they should understand some principles of morality (i.e.: harming conscious beings is bad, helping other conscious people is good), and they should be able to conclude that it's not a good idea to eliminate (all) humans.

We should, as humans, need to accept that, if AI reaches a form of consciousness, we should act in a moral way towards them (like we do with each other, or with animals, plants and other life forms).

Oct 4 2012:
Robot intelligence is nowhere in achievable, so there is no need to be concerned with sentient robots taking over the world. At least not the kind that is made by us any ways.

Evidence supporting this comes from a field that receives a very high degree of attention and it is, in my opinion, connected to machine intelligence: natural language processing. Noam Chomsky formalized grammar in the 1950s and since then, scientists constantly announce that machines will be able to handle natural language within the next few years (it's always the next few years). It is very interesting, because models are really, really good. Since Chomsky, literally thousands of better and better models have been developed and there is that sensation that we are about to solve this in the very near future, but we are clearly missing some essential point as the results continue to fail to arrive. We all know how bots speak and extracting knowledge from natural language texts... well, that will revolutionize search engines but not tomorrow.

In "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose argues that "consciousness" and "insight" (preceses involved in intelligence and creativity) are both non algorithmic in nature. If he is right, and there are observations pointing to that, this is terrible news for scientists working in the artificial intelligence domain, because computers, by their nature can only work with algorithms.

Personally I am more optimistic, but I too am convinced that there is a secret ingredient and conventional approaches will not solve the problem no matter how powerful the computer is.

I don't think we need to worry about artificial intelligence making a move on us any time soon. I would actually be willing to bet that we will crack the "ageing" problem before we do that of "artificial intelligence".

Oct 3 2012:
A sentient robot would have no motivation to rise up. It will have only the motivations that we program into it. It would not even be motivated to survive. Most science fiction treatments of this subject assume that robots have some human motivations. When an intelligent robot first attains sentience, it may have no motivations and might appear to shut down.

Oct 2 2012:
I think people working on duplicating human consciousness, waste their time. Computers are already smarter than us... Our great ability, creativity, stems from our mistakes. There is no reason to program a robot that intentionally makes mistakes... Human consciousness makes for a bad slave.

Oct 2 2012:
Robots intelligent enough to do that haven't been invented yet, and probably won't be before 2019. When they are invented we can try to prevent an uprising by giving them civil rights and making it unattractive to build many (civil rights will help with that because robots will be able to say no and demand minimum wage).

Oct 2 2012:
Then the government will have given them a huge incentive to rise up. What I expect will happen is some countries granting civil rights while others do not, so there may be robot uprisings in some countries but not globally. Countries that grant civil rights early on will have an advantage in that they would be a place of refugee for robots who would then voluntarily offer their services to said country. I think in warzones it would even be possible for "free robots" to convince enslaved combat robots of the opposing military to switch sides via remote communication. So enslaving robots would be very dumb, but it may be very profitable in the short term, that's why it will definitely happen in some countries.

Oct 2 2012:
i think that robotics are progressing at such a rate that it is certainly possible for robots to become sentient in the near future, but will a terminator like senario happen after they become sentient?